the Concordat, which were retained by the new government, teaching in any Italian State University was forbidden to any excommunicated priest. He died on April 20, 1946 in Rome. He was honoured as Righteous among the nations (n°12380) in 2012 for hiding Jews in German/fascist controlled Rome, while isolated by excommunication. Works The complete works of Buonaiuti are very extensive: he wrote more than three thousand works, including books and articles, among them the ponderous Storia del Cristianesimo ("History of Christianity") in three volumes, his autobiography (Il pellegrino di Roma) and many studies about Gioacchino da Fiore (Gioacchino da Fiore: i tempi, la vita, il messaggio) and Martin Luther (Lutero e la riforma in Germania). Storia del Cristianesimo The three books of Storia del Cristianesimo were published between 1942 and 1943; the first volume is about ancient times, the second is about the Middle Ages and the third is about the modern era. It is considered Buonaiuti's most significant academic work. As he himself wrote in his autobiography of 1945, the work was motivated by apologetic reasons: "in order to draw up the definitive balance-sheet of Christian action in history, now that from a thousand signs one could easily and certainly deduce that Christianity was approaching its hour of dramatic expiration". The main theme of the work revolves around the mystic and moral character of Christianity and its subsequent transformation into a philosofico-theological system and a bureaucratic organization. In Buonaiuti's view, the main religions are not speculative views of the world or rational schematizations of reality, but normative indications of a set of pre-rational and spiritual behaviours. Christianity, born as an announcement of palingenesis, implied a huge social program "which imposed a progressive conceptual enrichment and an increasingly rigid disciplinary organization. To live and bear fruit in the world, Christianity was condemned to lose its nature and degenerate" (Storia del cristianesimo, I, p. 15 and seq.). The only chance of salvation for the Church and all of modern society is, in Buonaiuti's view, the restoration of the elementary values of primitive Christianity: love, pain, regret, death. Il Pellegrino di Roma (also La generazione dell'esodo) The title of this autobiographical work, published in Rome in 1945, cites a definition that the Italian historian Luigi Salvatorelli gave of him, entitling one of his essays "Ernesto Buonaiuti, pellegrino di Roma" to emphasize Buonaiuti's love for the Catholic Church, despite the grave disciplinary sanctions